From Ability to Inclination to Meaning — The Migration of Agency: 3 Inclination as the Pivot

From distributed ability to relational alignment: how vertebrates coordinate social life.

As life scales up in individuality and mobility, structural ability ceases to be the main organizing force. In vertebrates, agency is distributed not through architecture or morphologically fixed roles, but through alignment of inclinations — relational, perspectival biases that guide attention, action, and coordination.

This post examines how herd animals and gelada baboons exemplify the pivot from ability to inclination.

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1. What is Inclination?

Inclination is:

• The local bias or tilt of a perspectival locus (an individual) within a readiness field.

• Shaped by attention, perception, prior interactions, alliances, and environmental context.

• Flexible and emergent: it changes in real-time as individuals interact and as ecological pressures shift.

In contrast to ability:

• It is relational rather than architectural.

• It organises collective behaviour dynamically, rather than prefiguring it structurally.

• It allows individual autonomy while maintaining coherence.

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2. Herds: Synchrony Through Bias

In species like gazelles or wildebeest:

• Alignment arises from movement biases and shared attention: who watches, who flees, who grazes, who follows.

• Individuals coordinate without a blueprint; coherence emerges from the local inclinations of many.

• Predation, foraging, and migration patterns are expressions of the field of inclinations.

Here, perspectival alignment is sufficient for robust collective behaviour without structural embedding.

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3. Gelada Baboons: Layered Alliance Fields

Geladas extend the complexity:

• Nested units: one-male units, bands, herds

• Social organisation is maintained through alliances, grooming networks, and attentional hierarchies.

• Individuals occupy multiple relational positions simultaneously, balancing conflict and cooperation.

• Collective behaviour is a product of distributed inclinations, layered across scales of social attention and obligation.

This demonstrates how inclinations generate complex coherence without structural rigidity.

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4. Key Themes

1. Relational Emergence – Coherence arises from alignment of individual inclinations, not structural rules.

2. Partial and Graded Individuation – Each vertebrate maintains autonomy while participating in collective readiness.

3. Dynamic Flexibility – Inclinations shift with context, allowing adaptation to environmental or social perturbations.

4. Perspective as Locus of Agency – Individuals act from their local construals, which collectively define the social field.

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5. Why Ability is Insufficient

• Physical ability (speed, strength, vigilance) is necessary but not sufficient to explain collective action.

• Social fields depend on who attends to whom, who defers, who allies, who challenges, all of which are relational inclinations.

• Coordination is thus perspectival, not structural.

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6. Implications for the Gradient

Inclination represents the pivot point in the gradient of collective actualisation:

• Below: ability dominates (colonial and eusocial systems).

• At vertebrate scales: inclination dominates, reflecting increased autonomy and fluidity of individuation.

• Above (humans): symbolic structures reintroduce a higher-level form of collective ability.

Inclination explains why vertebrate social systems are flexible, layered, and resilient, without needing fixed architecture.

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7. Conclusion

In vertebrate sociality:

• Agency is perspectival, distributed across individuals with autonomous inclinations.

• Coherence emerges relationally, not structurally.

• Individuation is graded and context-sensitive, making social fields dynamic and adaptive.

Next, the series will examine Post 4 — Humans: Symbolic Expansion of Readiness, where semiotic structures reintroduce a high-level form of collective ability, completing the gradient from ability to inclination to symbolic life.